Digging into a poll on gun ownership by Politico and Morning Consult that was reported in The Hill produced an interesting revelation: Just over two-thirds of the participants say nobody in their household owns a gun of any kind.
So, when The Hill reported the results of this survey showed “Approximately 2 in 3 Americans…said that they support greater restrictions on gun ownership,” should this be taken with a proverbial grain of salt? The Hill said the survey had a margin of error of 2 percentage points.
The Politico-Morning Consult poll was conducted April 9-12 and includes responses from 1,992 registered voters. But 1,327 of those respondents aren’t gun owners while only 665 said they live in a household where someone owns a firearm.
But could the imbalance between gun owners and non-gun owners have been at least partly responsible for the way the numbers and percentages on certain questions break down? Here are some results:
- 45 percent (896) think Democrats in Congress are trusted more than Republicans, who are trusted by 34 percent (669) to handle gun policy.
- 46 percent (924) think it is more important to limit gun ownership than it is to protect the right of Americans to own guns (44 percent (884).
- 65 percent support banning so-called “high capacity magazines” while only 23 percent oppose such a ban.
- 64 percent support banning so-called “assault weapons” while only 25 percent oppose a ban
- 73 percent support requiring a three-day waiting period on gun purchases while only 17 percent oppose a wait.
- 72 percent want to require so-called “safe storage” of firearms while 18 percent are opposed.
- 70 percent (1,395) support “creating a national database with information about each gun sale, while 20 percent (393) do not and 10 percent (204) have no opinion. (Interestingly, the numbers here break down closely along the lines of gun owners versus non-gun owners participating in the survey.)
Still, when it comes to repealing the Second Amendment, 55 percent oppose the idea while 23 percent support a repeal and 22 percent surprisingly have no opinion or simply don’t know. So, even non-gun owners, it appears, are not keen on the idea of erasing the amendment protecting the right to keep and bear arms from the Bill of Rights.
Another interesting survey revelation was that more people blame Republicans in Congress (40%) than Democrats (28%) for mass shootings. And 21 percent blame Joe Biden, but 67 percent do not.
Forty-five percent blame the National Rifle Association for mass shootings while 76 percent blame illegal gun dealers, which is an odd result because in most recent mass shootings the killers legally purchased guns from licensed dealers and passed background checks in the process. The NRA does not sell firearms, so perhaps it is the organizations policy of defending the Second Amendment that is blamed.
